The proposed research builds on prior studies, manifest need, and a successful pilot project to develop tests and indicators of the nature of the world portrayed in television drama and its cultivation of public conceptions of social reality. The project is predicated on the assumption that such conceptions are derived from the common symbolic context which presents and interprets them, and that television drama is the most massive source of the common context. Mass produced fictional representations of the "facts of life" create a mythic world of social reality which serves institutional and other social purposes. The functioning of elements of that mythic world can be assessed by investigating the ways and extent to which children and adults conceive of actual social reality in those terms, and the relationships of such imagery and knowledge to that cultivated by other media and modes of communication. Annual monitoring and analysis of prime time network television drama along dimensions relevant of social and mental health and public policy will be continued and will be related to measures of the images and knowledge that the television world might cultivate. The instruments of content analysis and semi-projective tests and surveys of viewer conceptions have been developed in the pilot study whose findings demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the proposed research. Striking evidence of the cultivating effects of heavy viewing has been revealed in the preliminary findings of the pilot study. The proposed investigation will combine measures of television content and cultivation effects into a system of cumulative and comparative indicators of mass-cultural trends in modern societies.